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Good news everyone: your tax dollars are going to buy me a Nintendo Wii in September! Thank you SSHRC, for your fat academic grant. And thank you Ryerson, for having a fresh-faced grad program that reaps charity-case scholarships like fields of corn. I knew I made the right choice in choosing a schol with more free corn-money than national prestige.

**STARS**CHANGE**THE**TOPIC**

The Scutt took me to see Taking Back Sunday last night which was awfully sweet of her, especially because it was my idea and I made her come too. Less sweet was the hour and a half TTC ride down to Arrow Hall on Airport Rd. It only just crosses over into Mississauga, but this apparently justifies tacking an additional two-fifty onto the fare. Just so you know, the net rape of a taxi is probably less violent than the net rape of public transit.

Taking Back Sunday is one of those bands that make you wonder about why you are old. You will see people you knew in high school. You will go into the drinking pit to avoid hordes of pierced monkey-children who charge towards and away from the stage en masse. Nobody knows exactly why they charge, least of all themselves. Is this a moshing song? Let's mosh! Does that song suck, and now it's pizza time? My mom totally gave me ten bucks for food. Perhaps your studded belt was lost while crowdsurfing, and leading a screaming brigade of 20 Black Hoodies into the stage-front Hellmouth will somehow help. Inexplicable chaos claims the hour. Inexplicable screaming claims the stage (thanks Underoath!).

And yet this shit would've totally resonated with me if I was younger. Now it's an ironic experiment overlapping shameful nostalgia for crybaby lyrics. I guess you can't really grow up with a band like Taking Back Sunday, you're sorta supposed to grow out of them and into something age-appropriate like jazz... or classic rock... or self-help CDs. You can see it in the quizzical expressions and crossed arms of the 19+ behind the generational barricades of the drinking corral. We were all implicated as bashful hangers-on, like those old Matthew McConaughey guys who can't leave high school parties alone.

Still, some carroty blond girl with a makeup-cake face asked Scutt when she graduated high school and that was VERY WORTHWHILE. You go and you see the past, a past with more steel ears and uniform uniforms than you remember, and you laugh. Because you can't go back to that age but really don't want to, either. High school was an arduous, facile time, a place to be alternately endured and enjoyed but never repeated. After all, soldiers don't pick their way through a minefield only to turn back and reminisce about all the pins they forgot to step on. A Taking Back Sunday show is the cynical 20-something's version of returning to Vimy Ridge, the ancient sound of guitars and gunfire pushing you onwards.

Posted by Chris at 01:58 PM >> Commentations (2)